I just discovered that Asahi.com has a "Cool Japan" section, dealing with everything related to the various representations of Japanese modernity. These include both Western fantasy about present day Japan and japanese self-projection into the world.

This is an additional ironic twist of fate. American pop music star copying Japanese mangas....when for decades, Japanese have been accused of copying everything that was coming from the West and being unable to create anything of their own. However, besides this anecdotic issue, this story points out another that is a lot more preoccupying, that is piracy and copyrights violation. From what I can see on the livejournal entry that offers a frame-by-frame comparison of Simmon's manga and Bleach, it does look like he has been heavily copying not only the graphic style but also the character design and whole scenes from Bleach. However, this doesn't really tell us how much Simmon actually took from Bleach, especially at the narrative level. Did he also heavily take from its story or did he simply inserted scenes that he found cool and inspiring within a fictional universe of his own? This isn't really clear from any of the comments. But then again, when one looks at the extraordinary resemblance between graphic design and characters from one manga to the other, it might also be difficult to accue him of plagiarism. After all, even though there is some diversity of representations in manga, it is kind of limited by some aesthetic codes. In the end, manga heroes within the same genres do tend to look extraordinarily alike to the point that it isn't rare to confuse them, if they are taken out of their original context.

I hope Hayao Miyazaki isn't reading this! The last term he'd use to qualify his animation cinema is "anime". In general terms, "anime" is used to refer to animated series for TV broadcast and video distribution. For a journalist who claims to have an inside knowledge of this audiovisual univers, that's quite a confusion to make!